Overview

Background

• Primarily inspired by GURPS
• Some notable games where player characters can accumulate disadvantages:
  • Mordheim
  • Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
  • Darkest Dungeon
• Rogue Legacy also prominently features disadvantages though they are only auto-assigned during character creation, not acquired over the course of play

Motivation

• Disadvantages fit particularly well in survival horror games
• I've toyed around with idea in the past of having characters age and get slowly weaker over the course of a playthrough—I wasn't completely sold on the idea when it was a simple stat loss (gradual decline in max health, speed, etc.) but endlessly accumulated disadvantages sounds more interesting (I may have thought about that before but the foundation of my designs did not support the idea as well as the current foundation.)
  • Part of the motivation for this is the market currently has more than enough power fantasies and I like the idea of anti-power fantasies, which again is more inline with survival horror
    • Part of this motivation is also because I think excessive power fantasizing is unhealthy and is subtly warping cultural values
• All that to say, with the combination of disadvantages and an intrinsic world, potentially most or all of the scaling difficulty of the game could be simply through disadvantage accumulation
  • The world doesn't get more dangerous, the player traits effectively cause the player to be more dangerous